2022-11-02
This is a short post about my philosophy when it comes to deck structure in Anki. I'm intending it mainly as notes I can come back to later, so please forgive its briefness and lack of context.
I prefer to put all my cards into big decks (e.g. a single deck for the whole of geography) and then label the contents of cards using tags – tags are really good at labelling content because you can apply more than one simultaneously and you can even create hierarchical tags.
My philosophy is that the structure of your decks should be for one thing and one thing only – to organise scheduling. The important thing about a deck is that it has scheduling options. So I will have separate decks if I want different scheduling options, or if I know in advance that I never want to study groups of cards together. (E.g. not mixing geography and French cards.) I don't ever have a separate deck just because the content of cards is labelled differently (E.g. Subject X module 1, module 2, etc.)
Using decks to organise both content and scheduling just makes things messier in the long run, because you're trying to accomplish two competing tasks with a single tool. Tags are better at labelling content because that's what they're designed to do. For example, you can add multiple tags to the same card – such as a a card that relates both to physics and chemistry. With decks that's a bit of a puzzle to choose which one. With tags you can just give it both.
It is even possible to set up study sessions by tag, which means you can e.g. study all your chemistry cards and it will include all those ones which are also labelled "physics" automatically. While conversely if you want to study physics it will include all the ones which are dual-tagged as well. This isn't possible with decks alone.
If I'm studying something with an exam I tend to put that in a special deck because it matters for scheduling purposes. Once the exam is over I make sure all its cards have appropriate tags and then I move them into a more generic deck. One benefit of this method is that it allows me to easily put old cards which may be relevant into the exam study deck along with the new cards, without everything getting hopelessly confusing.